Science in Uncertainty By Manjunath.R

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Book Synopsis

The very expression "certainty" is a contradiction in terms. There is rarely such thing as 100% certainty - and everything less than this is uncertain. The very core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices and these prejudices are organized into equations. For many people this might be a startling claim. Uncertainty does not mean we know nothing, that evidence is unquestionably fraught with misinterpretation. We can say how far we are from the end state, 'almost certain' for instance. Our facts and knowledge of the science should always be taken with a skeptical grain salt. Uncertainty in science which in effect means that nothing is real in any absolute sort of way.

Excerpt:

The very expression “certainty” is a contradiction in terms. There is rarely such thing as 100% certainty – and everything less than this is uncertain. The very core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices and these prejudices are organized into equations. For many people this might be a startling claim. Uncertainty does not mean we know nothing, that evidence is unquestionably fraught with misinterpretation. We can say how far we are from the end state, ‘almost certain’ for instance. Our facts and knowledge of the science should always be taken with a skeptical grain salt. Uncertainty in science which in effect means that nothing is real in any absolute sort of way.

To many people, mathematics presents a significant barrier to their understanding of science. Certainly, mathematics has been the language of physics for four hundred years and more, and it is difficult to make progress in understanding the physical world without it.

If a force F acts on a particle of mass m0 at rest and produces acceleration a in it, then the force is given by: F = m0a. The particle remains at rest (a = 0) when no external force (F=0) acts on it. Under this condition the rest mass of the particle is m0 = F/a = 0/0, which is meaningless. There can be no bigger limitation than this.